> From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> > It doesn't waste their resources, because it improves the level of > service that they see. Giving someone immediate feedback that their > address is invalid is far preferable to trying to send them a bounced > mail message that will never arrive; and keeping our mail servers > from being bogged down with bounces that will never get delivered > helps free them up to deliver legitimate traffic. > ... That is the same sort of reasoning that spammers use to justify their activities. - bounces would not bog down your mail servers, since you can discard or otherwise deal with bounces with no more "bogging" than you are spending poking at other people's systems. This aint rocket science, because even the spammers that want to avoid bounces understand how to do that. (Many spammers want to receive bounces to clean their lists, because some big ISPs and others automatically black-list SMTP clients after they've sent to too many bad addresses.) - a mechanism that could really determine that addresses are valid could be useful in a web page to provide immediate feedback to users. The reality of MX servers, firewalls, sendmail "catch-all" maps, and other things make the RCPT command too unreliable to use for that purpose. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com